To be filed under "shoulda-woulda-coulda" and "no-shit-sherlock" and also "forgot-to-write-about-this-fifteen-years-ago"...
I have had to think about XML for the first time in a few years (for the curious, you can read this EPUB bug I filed). If XML had had an array type for simple values (strings), then instead of representing a list of values like this:
<topLevel>
<myList>
<item value="abc" />
<item value="def" />
<item value="ghi" />
</myList>
</topLevel>It could have been this:
<topLevel myList=["abc", "def", "ghi"] />Would folks have abandoned XML for JSON so quickly?